El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele has won re-election by a landslide. The contest wasn’t fair, as Bukele, able to run for a second term thanks to judicial manoeuvres that violated the constitution, abused state media and resources. But there was no fraud: Bukele is extremely popular, and people chose to reward his ‘war on gangs’ that has made them feel safer, despite its steep human rights costs. The election gave Bukele more of the unaccountable power that allowed him to tackle violence but is ill-suited for addressing pressing social and economic problems. When people eventually want to try other options, they’ll find it very hard to vote him out.

No one, friend or foe, doubted President Nayib Bukele’s landslide victory in the 4 February elections. On election night the president-candidate proclaimed himself president-re-elect, claiming over 85 per cent of the vote and at least 58 of 60 parliamentary seats. News outlets around the world announced Bukele’s election success and congratulations from foreign dignitaries poured in, even though there were no official results yet.

Bukele and his supporters came out to celebrate as the vote count, then at about 30 per cent, showed they had around 10 times more votes than the runner-up, someone most voters had never heard of. Then for the rest of the week the Supreme Electoral Court’s (TSE) website froze at 70 per cent of the vote counted for president and barely above five per cent for the Legislative Assembly.

As details emerged of significant glitches in election reporting software, doubts were raised about the veracity of the published results and opposition groups called for an annulment and rerun. The TSE agreed to a manual recount of votes affected by system failures, accounting for 30 per cent of presidential ballots and all legislative votes.

However, while a recount proceeded for legislative votes, presidential votes were eventually only verified through tally sheets, and on 10 February it was officially announced that Bukele had been re-elected with 82.7 per cent of the vote. His main contender, of the leftist FMLN – Bukele’s party of origin – took a meagre 6.25 per cent. Combined, the four opposition candidates barely got 17 per cent support. Turnout rates were undisclosed.

Irregularities aside, there was no systematic fraud. Most voters enthusiastically backed Bukele, just as opinion polls had forecast, bolstered by the perceived resounding success of his ‘war on gangs’. Democracy had won – or had it?

Free and fair?

Bukele wasn’t supposed to be on the ballot, as the Salvadoran constitution bans immediate presidential re-election. But the constitution relies for its interpretation on the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court – which in its current composition eats straight out of Bukele’s hand.

In 2014, the Constitutional Chamber ruled that re-election was only possible after two terms, a 10-year wait. But following February 2021 legislative elections, which Bukele’s party, Nuevas Ideas, won comfortably, the Bukele-dominated Legislative Assembly dismissed the judges who’d antagonised the president by declaring some of his policies unconstitutional and appointed obedient new ones. Some labelled this an institutional coup.

In September 2021, this court gave the green light to the president’s re-election. Its reinterpretation of the constitution focused exclusively on the last sentence of one of six articles that jointly made the ban on immediate election absolutely clear. This sentence states that someone can’t be a candidate for the presidency if they’ve exercised this role in the six months prior to the start of the presidential term they’re running for.

On the basis of this, Bukele requested a ‘leave of absence’ for the last six months of his term so he could dedicate himself fully to the campaign. There was one precedent for this in Salvadoran history – a 1930s general who initially reached power through a coup, used this tactic to get re-elected with 100 per cent of the vote and then changed the constitution over and over so he could stay in power as long as he wished.

The unconstitutional waiving of the ban on re-election was one of the reasons the election observation mission of the Organization of American States (OAS) recognised, in its preliminary report, that the playing field was extremely uneven. The regional body emphasised that election day was peaceful and people exercised their right to vote uncoerced. It acknowledged that the wide gap between Bukele and his opponents left no doubt about who the winner was, with provisional numbers coinciding with its informal tally. But it also denounced two major anomalies that had severely distorted the democratic process.

The first was the imbalance of power that both allowed Bukele to stand for re-election and gave him absolute control over state resources, doing away with any semblance of fair competition.

The Salvadoran Electoral Code bans early campaigning, allowing it on this occasion between 3 October 2023 and 31 January 2024. But a president practising perpetual propaganda was never going to comply. The TSE systematically ignored complaints about early campaigning, the government’s use of official media and public resources for campaigning and its refusal to give opposition parties their due share of designated campaign funds.

It was estimated that up to 98 per cent of money spent on political advertising between August and December 2023 was spent by the ruling party. Bukele had plenty of opportunities to publicise his major achievement: the reduction of gang violence to historically low levels. Opposition voices were simply drowned out.

The second anomaly was holding an election under an extended state of emergency entailing the suspension of freedoms of association and peaceful assembly and due process guarantees. Initially declared following a spike in killings by gangs in March 2002, the state of emergency was subsequently extended several times until the exception became the rule.

Bukele’s ‘war on gangs’

When in March 2022 the Mara Salvatrucha gang killed 87 people in 72 hours, Bukele pushed aside his previous tactic of negotiating with gang leaders and declared war on them. Absolute power was a key ingredient of his new approach, as it allowed him to militarise the streets, detain thousands of people without a warrant and convict them following express mass trials.

More than 77,000 were detained this way – more than one per cent of the country’s 6.3 million people. There have been widespread allegations of arbitrary detentions based on little or no evidence and a complete lack of due process. People have been detained in overcrowded facilities, with reports of widespread torture and mass graves of hundreds who died in custody.

Two weeks into the state of emergency, human rights groups had already reported more than a hundred arbitrary detentions. In response, Bukele argued it was to be expected that some innocent people would be caught in the net, and that a ‘one per cent’ margin of error was acceptable if it meant that the 99 per cent who were guilty remained behind bars. Fed up with the violence that made life impossible, most Salvadorans agreed.

The numbers of detainees who were subsequently released suggest that Bukele’s ‘margin of error’ was closer to 10 per cent, but this didn’t harm Bukele’s popularity. A few years ago, El Salvador was rated the country with the world’s highest homicide rates. Now people could go out of their homes without risking their lives, and they were mostly thankful for it.

Bukele’s soaring popularity crossed borders. His re-election was hailed by many in the region who want to see his example emulated in their countries. But this strategy could twice fail them: by bringing human rights costs much higher than Bukele’s government has publicly admitted, and because there’s a mismatch between Bukele’s ‘solution’ and the reality of violence in other countries in the region, where the problem is less territorially rooted gangs than the much more transnational issue of drug trafficking.

Pressure on civic space

Civic space conditions steadily worsened under the state of emergency. Attacks against journalists rose sharply since the start of the Bukele presidency, with an 184 per cent increase between 2019 and 2021. The assault didn’t stop. Between July 2023 and February 2024, the Association of Journalists of El Salvador registered 64 acts of aggression against the press, mainly by public officials against online media reporters.

Many journalists have been driven into exile, and in April 2023 the investigative digital outlet El Faro moved its operations to Costa Rica. The potential for reprisals resulted in widespread self-censorship. Systematic vilification of critical voices, by senior public officials and their social media trolls, also discouraged private advertising in independent media, further challenging the financial sustainability of the few remaining sources.

Accusations of gang links have been levelled against grassroots activists and they’ve been increasingly criminalised. In August, Indigenous rights organisations denounced the persecution of Nahua community leaders. They reported that, just one day after a protest against a construction project on Indigenous land, security forces showed up at a community leader’s home to check IDs on the grounds that there was an ongoing investigation. In September, civil society called attention to the persecution of peasant and environmental leaders such as Benjamin Amaya, criminalised for organising to try to stop private exploitation of land owned by local communities.

In November, Salvadoran civil society groups stated that they were facing ‘one of the most adverse scenarios’ since the end of the 1980 to 1992 civil war, as a result of police harassment, censorship and the closure of channels for dialogue with the government.

Voices from the frontline

Carolina Amaya is a Salvadoran freelance journalist specialising in climate crises and socio-environmental conflicts.

 

Bukele’s government has been authoritarian throughout all these years and in many ways, not just in the area of security. During the pandemic it locked up thousands of people who did not comply with isolation directions. When the quarantine was over, it established the state of emergency that continues to allow it to spy on us, persecute us and lock us up. Bukele has militarised the streets, and this intensified in January 2024, on the eve of the election. The military has been patrolling every neighbourhood of San Salvador, the capital, to demonstrate its presence and power.

The public is grateful that the gangs lost much of their grip over the country. That is the main achievement of the Bukele administration. The problem is that most people are unaware of the reality of Bukele’s negotiations with gangs, so they think that he managed to clear the streets of gang members just by subjecting them to his state of emergency.

The media’s handling of images of imprisoned gang members has been very effective, to the point that it has had international repercussions. In several Latin American countries experiencing the scourge of organised crime, people are calling for an authoritarian figure just like Bukele to put an end to it. Even the president of Honduras, ideologically far removed from Bukele, has opted for militarisation and the use of repression to deal with gangs.

 

This is an edited extract of our conversation with Carolina. Read the full interview here.

Democratic decline

The quality of El Salvador’s democracy has experienced a serious decline since Bukele was first elected in 2019, with further setbacks at each subsequent election. That’s because democracy is about much more than majority rule – it’s a pluralistic system where the exercise of power must be subjected to rules set and known beforehand to prevent arbitrariness.

The 2021 legislative elections gave Bukele, previously at odds with an opposition-dominated Legislative Assembly, a supermajority that allowed him to exercise power without accountability. He coopted the judiciary so it would look the other way in the face of his illegal and unconstitutional acts and pave the way for his re-election. In June last year, the Bukele-dominated Legislative Assembly passed changes to the electoral rules that reduced the number of seats from 84 to 60 and amended the seat distribution formula in a way that favoured the biggest party.

Following the latest election, there’s no opposition to speak of anymore. Growing restrictions have also gone a long way in neutralising civil society and independent media.

All this was done with broad public support fuelled by Bukele’s unquestionable, albeit possibly temporary, success in controlling gang violence, and aided by a relentless propaganda effort. The international promotion of the country as paradise on earth has even succeeded in bolstering enthusiasm among the large Salvadoran diaspora in the USA, which made a substantial contribution to the vote count.

Voices from the frontline

César Artiga is coordinator of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty (GCAP) in El Salvador, the National Driving Team of the Escazú Agreement and the National Coalition for the Right to Live in a Healthy Environment.

 

This election was our last chance to recover the incipient democracy established with the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords in 1992. Bukele took office in June 2019 and since then the country has experienced profound human rights regression. The rule of law has been broken and institutional and constitutional guarantees have been annulled.

This was a unique opportunity to stop Bukele’s authoritarian onslaught and prevent him continuing to accumulate power and perpetuating himself as the country’s highest and only authority, which is what he pursued with his illegal candidacy. Re-election is unconstitutional in El Salvador, but he manipulated institutions and the entire state apparatus to push forward his project of total control and impose a culture of privilege and impunity for himself and his corporate family clan.

Following the vote, we are officially entering a dictatorship. In part this is because, having come to power for the first time through democratic means, Bukele has been re-elected in an unconstitutional manner. And it is also because of the levels of concentration of power that will result from the election, which as well as giving Bukele a resounding mandate at the head of the executive has also given him absolute control of the Legislative Assembly. There is nothing requiring extraordinary majorities that he won’t be able to do in his second term. This is in addition to control of the judiciary, which he has had since May 2021.

These days dictatorships are not like those of the 1970s and 1980s. In many cases, such as this, they are not the result of military coups, but of power grabbing by leaders who are initially democratically elected. Tactics have also changed, becoming much more subtle. The main danger is not that you will be made to disappear, although that might eventually happen, but that you will be threatened, defamed and ultimately neutralised through media attacks and smear campaigns that will erase you from the public space.

Our democracy is dying because of the deterioration of civic space. The electoral ritual loses meaning from the moment that fundamental civic freedoms, meant to enable citizens’ participation in public affairs, are no longer in place. The current government deliberately swept them away.

 

This is an edited extract of our conversation with César. Read the full interview here

What lies ahead however looks like the opposite of paradise. El Salvador has many other problems that, overshadowed by the urgent issue of violence, haven’t been addressed.

The government crackdown appears to have incapacitated gangs, reducing violence to historic lows and giving respite to communities previously overrun by illegal groups. Bukele is given credit for having achieved something no previous government did – and not necessarily because past administrations felt constrained by human rights scruples. But many doubt the long-term sustainability of his security policy. There are only so many people prisons can hold, and new versions of gangs could possibly emerge.

The government has done nothing to address the root causes of gang violence, and doesn’t seem to have a plan to do so. Inflation has soared, as has food insecurity, affecting as much as half the population. Bukele’s only response so far to social and economic problems has been his security policy. He seems to have placed all his bets on tourism rising as violence recedes. But there’s no certainty this will be enough.

The iron-fist approach Bukele has used to tackle the security question will not prove as useful for addressing underlying economic and social problems. What will happen when people get fed up with unresolved problems and want to try other options? Will the conditions exist for alternatives to emerge?

In the same act that they rewarded his performance on security issues, people gave Bukele all the tools he needs to hold on to power for as long as he wants. It won’t be easy for them to take those away when he overstays his welcome.

OUR CALLS FOR ACTION

  • The government of El Salvador must immediately lift the state of emergency and reinstate due process guarantees.
  • The government must engage with civil society and regional and international human rights mechanisms to implement effective security policies in ways that respect human rights.
  • Civil society should join together around a strategy to defend civic space and enable the expression of dissent.

Cover photo by José Luis González/Reuters via Gallo Images